The Cabinet Selection Process Is Veering Off Course

David Dayen

Four years of Donald Trump has offered an extreme version of Washington policymaking as a slipshod, ad hoc lunge from one decision to the next. That’s more the norm than people maybe assume. There’s less of a grand design to modern politics and more of a series of haphazard events; this is why governing has struggled so mightily of late, in fact. The case of Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-OH), President-elect Joe Biden’s apparent choice to run the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), is a signature example. Fudge didn’t want the HUD job, a fact revealed by someone close to the process—Marcia Fudge. She was openly campaigning to run the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) as recently as a few days ago, and scornful of the idea that she could be pigeonholed as an inner-city Black Democrat. “As this country becomes more and more diverse, we're going to have to stop looking at only certain agencies as those that people like me fit in,” she told Politico last month. “You know, it's always ‘we want to put the Black person in Labor or HUD.’” Marcia Fudge is now in HUD. It’s actually been worse for Black policymakers than Fudge makes out. No Democrat has appointed a Black individual to run HUD since 1979 (Clinton and Obama did not have a Black HUD Secretary), and only one Black person in history has run the Department of Labor (Alexis Herman, under Clinton). That has triggered demands on the Biden transition to foreground diversity, to repay the debt to people of color who have reliably voted for mainstream Democratic politicians without receiving proper representation in return. Fudge was intending to rethink the notion of how Black voices can be heard on policy. She set her sights on USDA, an agency whose primary function in terms of dollar amounts is actually to distribute Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, sometimes called food stamps. She has been on the Agriculture Committee in Congress since entering Congress in 2008, and now chairs the Nutrition Subcommittee, the key oversight entity for SNAP distribution...MORE